Jason Colavito2013

“Ultra-Terrestrials and the UFO Phenomenon: A Response to Steven Mizrach” was originally published in Paranthropology vol. 4, no. 3 (2013).

In the previous issue of this journal (vol. 4, no. 2), Steven Mizrach discussed “The Para-Anthropology of UFO Abductions: The Case for UTH,” or the “ultra-terrestrial hypothesis.” This is an idea put forward by Jacques Vallée, the famed ufologist, that the phenomena associated with UFOs and alien abduction could be explained by the actions of intelligent beings from another dimension manipulating human consciousness. In this, Vallée was preceded by science fiction writers like H. P. Lovecraft who used the same conceit in stories like “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) and “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), and earlier by the Victorian-era Spiritualists and Theosophists who argued that beings from other dimensions played a direct role in human affairs. For the Spiritualists, these were four-dimensional beings whose actions had consequences in three dimensions, while the Theosophists posited myriad parallel dimensions centered on other solar system bodies and populated by beings that moved into and out of this dimension to induce evolutionary change on earth.

Mizrach evaluated three competing explanations for the UFO phenomenon: (a) the traditional view that UFOs are nuts-and-bolts spaceships (the extraterrestrial hypothesis, or ETH), the more recent view that UFOs can be explained as modern folklore (the psychocultural hypothesis, or PCH), and the UTH. Mizrach, however, said that he was unsatisfied with the folklore explanation because for him it failed to explain the power of the UFO phenomenon and its effect on the lives of those who encounter alien beings.

Thus, Mizrach concludes that the UTH is the best remaining explanation for the UFO phenomenon, following Sherlock Holmes’ fictional dictum that eliminating the impossible leaves by default the truth:

The one thing I am sure of, however, is that there is an intelligence behind the phenomenon […] The ETH fails, but I also find the ‘pure’ form of the PCH insufficient, so I turn to Vallee’s UTH (sometimes also known as the EDI, or extra-dimensional intelligence theory), as the best model, for now.

Mizrach also asserts that modern science has discounted the possibility of the UFO phenomenon providing important or even interesting scientific data, and he claims that the United States government exerted influence in discounting the value of UFO research. In this article, I would like to challenge both of these views, beginning with Mizrach’s argument that science sees no value in UFO research.The Condon Report Mizrach’s argument in support of the UTH as the best model for the UFO phenomenon is predicated upon the supposition that the University of Colorado UFO Project’s Air Force-funded 1969 Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, better known as the Condon Report, acted as a mission statement for scientists and that it discounted the value of UFO research. The Report (1969) wrote that those scientists who studied UFOs concluded “that UFO phenomena do not offer a fruitful field in which to look for major scientific discoveries” (2). This is Mizrach’s warrant for suggesting that three “alternatives” to mainstream science (the ETH, PCH, and UTH) are therefore plausible avenues for research given the silence from science, which has declared UFOs incompatible with physics:

I mean, even if the essential model is correct, science could still learn something from studying UFO reports. Perhaps we could learn more about human misperception of stars and planets, the inability for people to correctly estimate the size or distance of aerial objects, or even the mechanisms behind the confabulation of false stories. Yet, that is the mantra of the 1969 report, that nothing of scientific value can be gained from studying UFO reports, and therefore the Air Force and other branches of government have no need to investigate them.

However, Mizrach has misrepresented the Condon Report, for, while the report opens with the conclusion that UFOs have nothing to teach about extraterrestrial beings, just a few paragraphs later, the report directly contradicts Mizrach’s version of its contents:

As the reader of this report will readily judge, we have focussed attention almost entirely on the physical sciences. This was in part a matter of determining priorities and in part because we found rather less than some persons may have expected in the way of psychiatric problems related to belief in the reality of UFOs as craft from remote galactic or intergalactic civilizations. We believe that the rigorous study of the beliefs—unsupported by valid evidence—held by individuals and even by some groups might prove of scientific value to the social and behavioral sciences. There is no implication here that individual or group psychopathology is a principal area of study. Reports of UFOs offer interesting challenges to the student of cognitive processes as they are affected by individual and social variables. By this connection, we conclude that a content-analysis of press and television coverage of UFO reports might yield data of value both to the social scientist and the communications specialist. The lack of such a study in the present report is due to a judgment on our part that other areas of investigation were of much higher priority. We do not suggest, however, that the UFO phenomenon is, by its nature, more amenable to study in these disciplines than in the physical sciences. On the contrary, we conclude that the same specificity in proposed research in these areas is as desirable as it is in the physical sciences.

Given that the report which Mizrach says determined the scientific view of UFOs asserts the value of social and behavior sciences for understanding the UFO phenomenon, it is therefore not permissible to classify the PCH as an “alternative” viewpoint tacitly coequal with the ETH and UTC. Rather, the PCH should be seen as the default (social) scientific explanation for the UFO phenomenon insofar as such a phenomenon exists (a point to which I will return). Thus, the work of Thomas E. Bullard (1989) in locating alien abduction claims in the context of traditional supernatural abduction narratives and the work of Susan A. Clancy (2005) probing the psychological origins of abduction narratives are not “alternatives” to consensus science but rather are operating entirely within the mainstream. If the “hard” sciences conclude that UFOs are impossible under the laws of physics as currently known, it does not follow that no scholarship emerges to explain why such claims persist.It is therefore not nearly as surprising as Mizrach claims that U.S. government agencies continued to record UFO sightings after the Condon Report. They did not “ignore the findings of the report” but rather followed its broader view. Or, more likely, they monitored such reports for what they could tell the government about Soviet aircraft and public perception of secret American craft. The American government, after all, is documented to have planted a fake UFO report in the Soviet press in connection with U.S. efforts to monitor Soviet activity in a strategically valuable Norwegian island in the Arctic (U.S. Dept. of State 1968; see also Colavito 2013). In other words, UFOs held interest for the government, just not in the context of extraterrestrial (or ultra-terrestrial) visitors.The Ultra-Terrestrial Hypothesis Strictly speaking, scientific research into PCH cannot preclude UTH. Even if it can be shown that alien abduction reports emerge primarily in the context of altered states of consciousness (ASC), typically during the transition between waking and sleep, this cannot categorically exclude the arrival of trans-dimensional intelligences at precisely that moment, nor can it preclude the idea that our dreams are excursions to the otherworldly beings’ homelands. However, by the same token, science cannot categorically exclude phlogiston, pink elephants, or the Greek gods, no matter how vanishingly remote the possibility of their existence. The better question is: With what warrant do we propose the existence of ultra-terrestrial beings? For Mizrach, summarizing Vallée and to a lesser extent Carl Jung, the answer is that PCH explanations are “unsatisfying” for two reasons: (a) alien encounters are too powerful and emotionally moving to be explained as the product of the human mind, and (b) UFO reports have physical correlates in the material world that cannot be explained by appeals to mental events. I would submit that both of these claims are false, though for different reasons. The question of the reality of mental events is a qualitative judgment. Mizrach recognizes that abduction reports are nearly identical to shamanic encounters with the gods in ASC, yet he “struggled with this as an explanation of sufficient power” to account for abductees’ changes in personality and ideology, as well as the appearance of the aliens to multiple witnesses. Multiple witnesses, however, he illustrates with the Travis Walton case, which skeptics have debunked quite clearly as a combination of financial desperation on the part of a group of failing loggers (he and his fellow witnesses would owe a significant financial penalty unless an “act of God” intervened) and a convenient viewing of NBC’s TV-movie about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction just two weeks earlier. A second case Mizrach cites, the Allagash “abduction” of four men, is similarly suspect due to the use of dubious regression hypnosis to generate the abduction report. Surely a hypothesis as radical as UTH requires evidence with firmer foundations. That leaves the question of the intensity of the experience. Surely this is an exquisitely subjective question, for there is no reliable way to judge whether a mental phenomenon is sufficiently intense to objectively warrant a change in behavior. Schizophrenics, of course, experience intense auditory hallucinations sufficient for them to justify changes in their behavior in response to these self-generated stimuli; however, very few even among fringe researchers consider this evidence of schizophrenic brains tuning in to alien wavelengths. In 2002, David Lewis-Williams proposed that modern human consciousness emerged during the Upper Paleolithic in connection with ASC, that the neurology of the human brain generated stock images in responses to ASC, and that culture defines how the individual experiences those stock images—as vortexes, tunnels, gods, monsters, aliens, etc. For Lewis-Williams, the intensity of these ASC experiences is what drove the emergence of higher order consciousness, and since each piece of the ASC experience can be induced experimentally by stimulation of the brain, the phenomenon as a whole is therefore reducible to the neurological function of the brain. Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (2005) later expanded this argument to show how the same processes are reflected in Neolithic culture, centered on a belief in the ability of the individual to travel through a vortex to meet with the ancestral spirits or the gods. The authors then connected this to modern cultures’ experiences and experimental laboratory results. Thus, from the earliest human cultures, all of the elements of the classic alien abduction were in place, and they could be demonstrated to draw from neurological—that is material, earthbound—sources. As I noted above, this cannot be strictly proved since the trans-dimensional aliens might well use ASC as a gateway from their dimension, as advocated by Graham Hancock (2007) in adapting Lewis-Williams’s work, but like phlogiston to the flame, the trans-dimensional beings become somewhat redundant for explaining alien abductions in the wake of neurological evidence. Is There a Singular UFO Phenomenon? A complicating factor that Lewis-Williams’s work creates for the UTH is the fact that shamanic ASC and historical “abduction” experiences, cited by Vallée and other UTH speculators, do not conform to the full narrative of the modern UFO phenomenon, as developed after the Betty and Barney Hill abduction claim (Fuller 1966) and J. Allen Hynek’s (1972) classification of three types of UFO encounters, culminating with contact. Prior to this, strange lights in the sky were not generally found in conjunction with other staples of the narrative, such as abduction, sexual experimentation, and cattle mutilation, a fact even the credulous Vallée (2009) himself seemed to concede in cataloguing the “best” evidence for prehistoric UFOs and finding no unambiguous evidence for a complete UFO narrative prior to the modern era, only fragments that paralleled portions of the modern narrative. This might mean that the trans-dimensional beings first emerged into our dimension only in 1947, 1961, or some other date, but this would not explain those partial parallels. I have previously traced the Hill abduction to alien encounter and medical experimentation motifs derived from three consecutive episodes of The Outer Limits (1964) airing over the three weeks prior to Barney Hill’s first hypnosis session, including the slanted-eyed aliens and their distinctive clothing, the invasive probing, the backwoods setting, and even an interracial narrative paralleling the Hills’ own romance (Colavito 2012). It is noteworthy that the Hills originally only reported to Project Bluebook seeing a flying saucer until they were placed in an altered state of consciousness three years later and began recalling abduction imagery exactly paralleling Outer Limits episodes in both plot and aesthetics from the weeks before hypnosis. This origin point for the classic abduction narrative strongly favors the PCH over the UTH if this order of events is correct. Given that high profile abduction cases that followed, including the Travis Walton incident, can be shown to reproduce ideas and imagery appearing originally with the Hill case, this again favors PCH over UTH. Since Mizrach cited Sherlock Holmes about acceptance of the improbable, it is only fair to mention Occam’s Razor in defense of the idea that the hypothesis with fewer assumptions is more likely to be correct; in this case, the proposal of an unseen and unattested alternative dimension of reality, populated by multiple beings of near-supernatural intelligence, who are capable of interacting with this dimension in fixed ways across time and space is vastly more complicated than the alternatives. The only serious support for this claim is the contention that the UFO phenomenon encompasses physical phenomena—such as UFOs that can be tracked on radar—that preclude a purely mental explanation. Indeed, this is Mizrach’s primary objection to PCH. This leads to my final question: Is the UFO phenomenon singular? The modern UFO phenomenon is composed (roughly) of four parts: UFO sightings, crop circles, cattle mutilation, and alien abduction. Ufologists disagree on whether crop circles and cattle mutilation should be considered part of the phenomenon, and alternative explanations exist even among believers. Cattle mutilation, for example, was traditionally ascribed down to the twentieth century to the evil power of the goatsucker (nightjar), a (real) bird whose mythology was reapplied to the Chupacabra, whose name (literally: goat sucker) belies its origins (see my chapter on the Chupacabra in Colavito 2013) and provides an equally incredible explanation for something science recognizes as natural decay. Similarly, prior to the modern UFO myth, lights in the sky were treated as a distinct class of “prodigy” from nocturnal visitation by strange visitors such as incubi and succubae, whom Vallée and Bullard both see as analogous to UFO denizens. These visitations, however, were not associated with spaceships or intense light, just kinky sex. Additionally, the first reported alien encounters—those from before the Hills like George Adamski’s—were wildly diverse, including civilized diplomatic meetings with Nordic-looking aliens from Venus, like those of Golden Age science fiction, as filtered through Theosophy. It is only after the 1960s that these threads come together in the modern UFO myth. Because we find the various elements of the UFO myth in isolation throughout history, the logical conclusion is that the four facets of the myth were originally separate and brought together because of the UFO myth and the UFO phenomenon is not the cause the four facets. In this an instructive parallel can be found in the ancient Greek myth of giants who (a) built the massive Mycenaean ruins, (b) left behind their gigantic bones, and (c) performed magic from their underground tombs and rose to communicate with those who sacrificed to them. The myth emerged from mistakes (about the origin of ruins and about the giant bones, really those of extinct Pleistocene mammals—see Mayor [2000]) and religious ideology, but it seemed supported by facts which were forever after linked to the myth. In the same way, the modern UFO myth is leading researchers down the path of proposing elaborate explanations for a phenomenon that cannot yet be proved to require a singular explanation. If treating sightings, abductions, mutilations, and crop circles as distinct events yields productive explanations for each (as skeptics contend), then the UFO phenomenon as a whole may be considered as a modern myth and the UTH can be discarded as redundant, though as with phlogiston and unicorns, it cannot be conclusively proven wrong, only unnecessary. This then frees the researcher to examine multiple causes for various phenomena, from ASC for most abduction cases to a wide range of events that yield lights in the sky. By discarding the strictures of forcing all of the factors of contemporary UFO mythology to conform to a single hypothesis, the truth may in fact emerge more fully and brilliantly than ufologists suspect.